A word of caution to any teenage girls planning to spend their summer vacations in Europe: Do not let your parents anywhere near Taken or risk being locked in your room with no hope of parole until you're 35.

A parent's worst nightmare writ large in flashing neon letters, Taken centers on the abduction of two 17-year-old American tourists, Kim (Maggie Grace) and Amanda (Katie Cassidy), mere hours after arriving in Paris for what was supposed to be a month-long trek following U2 around on tour through Europe.

Fortunately, Kim's father Bryan (Liam Neeson) happens to be a retired ex-CIA agent, one badass enough to take on Jason Bourne and James Bond and make them cower and beg for mercy - at the same time. Bryan, whose previous devotion to his career cost him his wife (Famke Janssen, bristling with bitter resentment) and daughter, was trying to make up for lost time when he reluctantly consented to allow Kim to jet overseas, despite his apprehensions. "Mom says your job made you paranoid," Kim tells him as he drives her to the airport. "My job made me aware," he replies.

So he's not at all surprised when the worst happens, and he immediately pounces into rescue mode, as if he had been expecting it all along. Director Pierre Morel (District B-13) paces Taken with the same brisk efficiency and ruthlessness Bryan uses to find his daughter (the movie clocks in at a quick 87 minutes, minus end credits), so even though the film is pure formula, there isn't a single moment in it when you start growing impatient.

Even the obligatory exposition at the start of the picture breezes by, because Neeson (unlike, say, Harrison Ford, who would have probably starred in this movie 10 years ago) is as good of a dramatic actor as he is a kick-butt action hero. It's almost as much fun watching Neeson and Janssen trading barbed-wire jabs as it is seeing Neeson wreak great and painful havoc on the men who have kidnapped his daughter. Almost.

Those men come from practically every country in Europe: Taken is an equal-opportunity offender when it comes to caricatures of sleazy, villainous foreigners, including, of course, the French, who come off all high and mighty but turn out to be the lowest of all.

Such developments are all in the spirit of the rousing B-picture Taken is at heart. It excels at making you feel really good when the bad guys get theirs, which happens constantly after the first 20 minutes. Like any half-decent thriller involving CIA superagents should, Taken also teaches you a couple of tricks that will come in handy if you should find yourself in a similar situation (including how to avoid being located via satellite while using a cellphone to taunt the authorities).

Neeson's estimable presence adds a level of class to what could have easily degenerated into a mere Death Wish knock-off. This is still a Death Wish knock-off, but it's a lot better acted than any of Charles Bronson's pictures. And hearing him spout lines like "I can have 30 agents here before you have time to scratch your worthless balls" is a lot more fun than having Jean Claude Van Damme recite the same dialogue. Neeson's an actor, you know?

Taken is nonsense, but it's terrifically entertaining nonsense, especially in the midst of the January movie doldrums. It provides the reckless thrills that Quantum of Solace lacked. It also offers further refinement on a lesson an old TV sitcom once taught us: When it comes to rescuing kids from multinational human trafficking rings, father really does know best.

Several news items have popped up over the last couple of days that are genuine head-scratchers, even by zany Hollywood standards. In no particular order:

- Kevin Zegers and Hilary Duff are in negotiations to star in a remake of the landmark classic Bonnie and Clyde directed by someone named Tonya S. Holly, whose sole previous film, When I Find the Ocean, tells of the adventures of a little girl and her pet rabbit and is described by a poster on imdb.com as "the absolute worst movie I have ever seen - hands down... run for your life!"

- Joel and Ethan Coen's The Hudsucker Proxy is being turned into a musical. I can imagine this scene on the stage. This is probably the single best sequence the Coens have ever directed and one of my favorite stand-alone montages of all time (the shot at the 2:34 mark makes me laugh out loud every time I watch it). It is also, completely by accident, an amusing illustration of what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in The Tipping Point. But the rest of Hudsucker onstage? I don't see it.

Several hundred people rioted in a theater in Patna, India that was showing the Best Picture Oscar favorite Slumdog Millionaire, angered by the film's title. The U.K. Times reports that activist Tateshwar Vishwakarma, who organized the protest and has even filed a lawsuit against some of the filmmakers, said the word "Slumdog" was the main focus of their anger.

"Referring to people living in slums as dogs is a violation of human rights," Vishwakarma told the paper. "We will burn [director] Danny Boyle effigies in 56 slums here."

Meanwhile, the parents of two of the child actors in the film, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, who continue to live in poverty-stricken conditions, have accused the filmmakers of exploiting the kids, even though a spokesman for distributor Fox Searchlight told the U.K. Telegraph that "for 30 days work, the children were paid three times the average local annual adult salary" and that "they were enrolled in school for the first time and a fund was established for their future welfare, which they will receive if they are still in school when they turn 18."

"Due to the exposure and potential jeopardy created by the unwarranted press attention, we are looking into additional measures to protect Azhar and Rubina and their families," the studio spokesman told the paper. "We are extremely proud of this film, and proud of the way our child actors have been treated."

Meanwhile, the executives running the Oscar campaign for Benjamin Button read the same news stories and muttered "Excellent."

Last night's 15th annual Screen Actors Guild awards confirmed what everyone suspected: Sean Penn, Heath Ledger and Kate Winslet are practically locks to win in their respective categories when this year's Oscars are handed out Feb. 22. Slumdog Millionaire's win in the Best Ensemble category also translates into a likely victory in the Best Picture competition.

The only category that remains too close to call is Best Supporting Actress since last night's winner in that category (Winslet) is in the running for the Best Actress Oscar. Right now, I'm leaning towards Vicky Cristina Barcelona's Penelope Cruz, although Viola Davis makes an indelible impression in Doubt with only one scene, and Academy members obviously loved the movie, considering how many nominations it received.

One of the nominees for Best Foreign Language film announced yesterday (and, I'm guessing, the likely winner), Waltz With Bashir opens in South Florida today and it's a stunner - the rare kind of movie that truly is unlike any you've ever seen before. You can read my review here.

Other movies opening today: Che, which really should be seen on the big screen, but you can catch via IFC video on demand if you don't feel like enduring four and a half hours in the theater; the close-but-no-cigar fantasy Inkheart; the laughably-bad Outlander; and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, which was not screened in advance for critics, and in which Rhona Mitra replaces Kate Beckinsale as the bloodsucker with a thing for hairy guys.

For every thing today's Oscar nominations got right - chief among them the two nods for Frozen River's Melissa Leo (Best Actress) and Courtney Hunt (Best Original Screenplay) - there were at least two things the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences got wrong.

How, for example, could The Curious Case of Benjamin Button score a whopping 13 nominations (just one short of the record shared by Titanic and All About Eve) but not include Cate Blanchett, whose performance in the film was arguably more important to the drama than Brad Pitt's leading turn?

The wildly popular The Dark Knight, a movie that audiences and critics agreed transcended the comic-book genre and attained the stature of dramatic art, snagged eight nominations, including the anticipated Best Supporting Actor nod for the late Heath Ledger, whose performance as the villainous Joker is one for the ages.

But the rest of The Dark Knight's nominations were in technical categories: No Best Picture, Director or Screenplay recognition. The same went for Pixar's magnificent Wall*E, the guaranteed winner of the Best Animated Feature award, which at least managed to snag a Best Original Screenplay nod among its six nominations.

But Wall*E, too, was shut out of the Best Picture and Director races, replaced instead by Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon and Stephen Daldry's The Reader, two middling, Oscar-baiting dramas that landed five nominations apiece - and were driven primarily by Hollywood's desire to congratulate itself on making serious, "important" movies.

Richard Jenkins' Best Actor nomination for The Visitor was, like the Frozen River recognitions, a testament that Oscar voters are still willing to pay attention to small pictures made outside the behemoth studio machinery. But Jenkins' well-deserved nod knocked out of the race Clint Eastwood, whose swan song performance in Gran Torino deserved to have been commemorated by the Academy.

Gran Torino was completely shut out of the Oscars, although the Eastwood-directed Changeling fared better, scoring three nominations including Best Actress for Angelina Jolie and an Art Direction nod for its superb 1920s period setting.

Eastwood's acting snub was one of the biggest disappointments of the morning's announcements, although it was soothed by the inclusion of The Wrestler's Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei in the Best Actor and Supporting Actress races. Rourke is the only one who stands a real chance of derailing Milk star Sean Penn's Best Actor chances: Theirs will be one of this year's most exciting competitions, although if Frost/Nixon's Frank Langella swoops in to steal it, I'm chucking my TV set out the window in protest.

Slumdog Millionaire's 10 nominations should help keep that movie chugging along on its path to mainstream-hit status. The film is also, at this moment, apparently the movie to beat for Best Picture. But how to explain the two Best Song nominations it received (for Jai Ho and O Saya), while Bruce Springsteen's moody, melancholy tune for The Wrestler got nada?

Other surprising and/or bewildering Oscar calls: Revolutionary Road's Michael Shannon was duly recognized for his electrifying performance in that film with a Best Supporting Actor nomination, but Kate Winslet's turn in the film as a frustrated housewife - easily the best work she's done to date - was ignored in favor of her more conventional turn in The Reader.

Rachel Getting Married's Anne Hathaway received a Best Actress nomination for her portrayal of a recovering addict wreaking havoc on her sister's wedding, but hers was the sole nomination in a film that was carried by an ensemble. Same went with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, whose Penelope Cruz got a Supporting Actress nod, but deserving co-stars Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall got zilch.

At least everyone in Doubt received a nomination for their performance, including Supporting Actress contender Viola Davis, who grabbed Oscar's attention by appearing in just one scene, and Best Actress nominee Meryl Streep, who extended her lead as the most nominated actor in Oscar history with 15 in the bank (Katharine Hepburn and Jack Nicholson trail her with 12 apiece).

Perhaps the most surprising nomination of the day was the Best Supporting Actor mention for Tropic Thunder's Robert Downey Jr. Although his performance in the film as a Method actor who alters his skin pigmentation in order to play a black man was admittedly brilliant, it isn't the kind of thing the Oscars usually pay attention to. Downey's success in Iron Man probably played a big part in bringing him the nomination, since between the two movies, the actor cemented his Hollywood comeback in a major way.

But Iron Man was a comic-book movie, so Academy members opted to celebrate Tropic Thunder instead, because we know how Oscar voters feel about superheroes. Just ask the makers of The Dark Knight.

Clocking in at almost 4 and 1/2 hours, Steven Soderbergh's two-part epic Che - comprised of The Argentine and Guerrilla - is certainly the longest and most detailed feature film ever made about the iconic revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

It is also the vaguest and most opaque, and therein lies its fascination. As a filmmaker, Soderbergh alternates between mainstream entertainments (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, the Ocean's Eleven trilogy) and more experimental, abstract pictures (Bubble, Solaris, Full Frontal). In Che, he uses a little of both approaches to make a movie that is as absorbing as it is frustrating.

Che is a highly pleasurable exercise in pure cinema - the half-hour battle in Santa Clara, Cuba, that closes The Argentine is a particularly well-choreographed and orchestrated piece of filmmaking - but it's an exercise built around a historical figure whose more notorious and loathsome aspects go curiously unmentioned. Soderbergh may not have set out to intentionally rile his audience, but there is a level of prankishness to some of his artistic choices in Che that have that effect anyway. Why make a movie about Guevara's role in the Cuban Revolution that leaves out everything Guevara did - and how swiftly he was corrupted by power - after seizing victory?

The answer, whether you agree with it or not, is up on the screen. Neither The Argentine (which was shot in gorgeous widescreen and uses space and geography as carefully as a John Sturges picture) nor Guerrilla (which was filmed largely on handheld cameras and has a grittier, more urgent feel) burrows very far into Guevara's psyche. Nor do they sketch the arc of his life or provide much historic context to his accomplishments. Almost two hours pass before we discover Guevara was married and had a daughter while he was fighting in the Sierra Maestra mountains. As a portrait of a man's life, Che is about as deep as a close-up of a T-shirt.

What drew Soderbergh to this material - what fascinated him to the point of fixation, extending the film's running time for a good hour longer than it needed to be - was the minutiae of Guevara's experiences in the field. The screenplays, written by Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. van der Veen, require at least a cursory knowledge of Guevara's life in order to make much sense, since they consist primarily of the accumulation of detail and plodding incident found in the two Guevara diaries that inspired the movies (Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and Bolivian Diary.)

Yes, The Argentine does show us the first meeting between Guevara (Benicio Del Toro, who plays Che with a combination of humble strength and righteous fury) and Fidel Castro (an uncanny Demian Bechir) in which ideologies are exchanged, and a bond is formed. But that's about all of the context we get. When Guevara travels to New York City in 1964 to deliver a speech at the United Nations building and is heckled by protesters who call him a murderer, the film has given you no way to know what they're talking about.

Guerrilla, which follows Guevara's failed attempt to do in Bolivia what he had pulled off in Cuba, is more linear and focused, although watching it immediately after The Argentine is close to exhausting, since so much of the movie consists of practically identical scenes: Guevara training his peasant army in the jungle, plotting his military strategy and wheezing from asmatic attacks. Whereas The Argentine ends on a note of jubilant victory, Guerrilla is a downward spiral of tension. Everything that could go wrong does, climaxing with Guevara's death. But the movie feels slighter and less substantial than the first chapter, and there are stretches in it that tax your patience in ways Soderbergh probably didn't intend.

Che is not exclusively a piece of hagiography, the way some have claimed. Soderbergh subtly weaves in directorial comments (a jump cut from Guevara presiding over the execution of two army deserters to his receiving a standing ovation at the U.N. assembly, for example) that do not refute the man's darker side. But they're much too subtle when compared to scenes in which a reporter asks Guevara what is the most important quality for a revolutionary to have, and he replies "Love," without a trace of irony.

Che is something of a landmark achievement - watch the whole epic in one sitting, and you'll probably never forget it - but it also smacks of a huge missed opportunity. It perpetuates the romantic myth, leaving the truth still out there.

The Argentine and Guerrilla open Friday at the Bill Cosford Cinema and Miami Beach Cinematheque and on Jan. 30 at the Cinema Paradiso. Both films will also be available via Video On Demand starting Friday. Consult your cable or satellite TV provider for availability details.

"The gap is sort of by design, because I'm more interested in Che as a warrior rather than a statesman or political figure. When you get into discussions about La Cabana with people, the only position that I can take is that the movie doesn't deny those things took place.

"For people who don't like Che, he is defined by what happened at La Cabana. But he's not defined by those incidents to me. To me, they seem consistent with his character. I think the Che who is in the movie is capable of all the things people accuse him of doing.

"You can't defend the stuff that went on in those six months. It became a circus. And it doesn't meet anybody's definition of due process. But Che admitted they were willing to ... kill innocent people in order to secure the Revolution. And what you have to consider is that every regime, including the United States, is capable of acting in extreme fashion when it feels threatened.

"The firebombing of Japan and the dropping of two nukes on civilians is, to my mind, extreme - so extreme no one has ever done anything like it since. And La Cabana was a version of that. Cuba had been colonized for centuries. Look at the list of countries that over time had been using it as their personal ATM. It was an overreaction to a bottled-up feeling that had been building for centuries."

Saw this on EW.com and thought I would share here. It's a very amusing alternate ending to Pineapple Express, which I probably would have before seen if I had been sent a review screener of the DVD. But nooooooo.

You have to wait a little while to get a good look at Mickey Rourke's face in The Wrestler. For the movie's first few minutes, director Darren Aronofsky keeps his camera mostly behind and to the side of the actor, playing the washed-up pro wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson, as he signs autographs for a pair of fans, catches his breath after his latest match, goes home to discover his trailer has been padlocked by his landlord for late rent, and ends up spending the night inside his ramshackle van.

When you finally get to really see Rourke's face, the result is a bit startling. Rourke hasn't exactly disappeared from the public eye - he's been acting steadily in films for the past 10 years - but his puffy, lumpy mug in The Wrestler still takes a little getting used to. He doesn't just look like 100 miles of hard road: He looks like he's been paving it, too.

That's part of what makes Rourke the perfect choice to play The Ram. Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain) persevered to cast the actor, despite the advice of everyone in Hollywood, for a reason: The Wrestler is one of those pictures where the lines between performer and character are intentionally blurred for dramatic gain.

Watching Rourke as The Ram, with his garishly bleached mane, artificial tan, steroid-pumped physique and ineffably sad, wounded eyes, you don't have to squint too hard to see the parallels between the two men. This is the fictional story of a wrestling superstar who, long removed from his heyday in the 1980s, is struggling to eke out a simple existence, dealing with a body crumbling from the abuses of the past and consumed by loneliness, having alienated everyone who was once dear to him, including his resentful daughter (Evan Rachel Wood).

The script, written by Robert D. Siegel, is replete with potentially corny cliches, including a stripper with a heart of gold (played by Marisa Tomei with her usual strength and poise), the closest thing The Ram has to a romantic relationship. The Ram also has been told by his doctor that if he enters the ring again, he risks a fatal heart attack. Befitting a picture about grown men in tights smacking each other around, subtlety plays a small role here.

But Aronofsky, leaving behind the high cinematic style of his previous films in favor of a straightforward, near-documentary approach, plays each of the story's turns (including its more improbable ones) with complete earnestness, counting on the sympathy Rourke earns from the audience to carry the film.

The Wrestler presents a fascinating peek at the workings of the pro wrestling industry (the tenderness and humor the athletes share backstage is the complete opposite of the ferocity they display in the ring). It is also, at times, breathtakingly graphic in its depiction of the lengths wrestlers will go to entertain the audience (the staple-gun match stands out as particularly brutal).

Mostly, though, The Wrestler is Rourke's show, and the movie reminds you just how engaging he can be, whether with a comical sequence in which The Ram tries to make a go at working behind a deli counter serving obnoxious patrons, or a heartbreaking scene in which we watch him playing a wrestling video game on an ancient Nintendo with a kid who lives down the street, momentarily lost in the memories of his golden past. It's a wonderful, career-reviving performance, and you can't imagine the movie without him. Welcome back, Mickey.

I haven't seen any of these, although I'm finally going to get to see Waltz with Bashir, which looks fantastic, Friday morning. In case you're wondering, Let the Right One In wasn't eligible for this year's competition. It'll be in the running in 2010, as long as Norway Sweden submits it as their official Oscar entry.